Sand volleyball narrowly earned a final stamp of approval from the NCAA today with the failure of a key vote that would have stricken it from the association's list of emerging sports for women. During the NCAA's annual meeting in Atlanta, 58 percent of the 284 Division I colleges and conferences present voted to remove the sport from the list, falling just short of the 62.5 percent that the measure needed to pass.

The Stevens Institute of Technology has settled a wide-ranging lawsuit filed last year by the New Jersey attorney general by agreeing to sweeping reforms of its governance structure and the resignation of its longtime president, Harold J. Raveché. According to The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., the university's finances will be overseen by an audit committee and a former state Supreme Court justice will file regular reports on Stevens's compliance with the settlement, which also resolves a countersuit the university filed against the state. The state lawsuit assailed Stevens and its board for financial mismanagement and the awarding of excessive compensation to Mr. Raveché, who made more than $1.1-million in 2007-8, according to a recent Chronicle survey. Mr. Raveché will remain a Stevens consultant until 2014 under the settlement.

A senior on the University of Southern Indiana's men's basketball team died Thursday night after collapsing during a game against Kentucky Wesleyan College. According to the Associated Press, university officials are unaware of any existing medical conditions that may have led to the death of Jeron Lewis, who was 21, but observers at the game saw him fall and hit his head after a scramble for a rebound.

The New Yorker's John Cassidy takes a random walk through the offices of economists and business professors at the University of Chicago, a bastion of laissez-faire thinking for decades, to find out how the old verities are holding up in the aftermath of what he calls the "blowup" since the economy hit the skids two years ago, amid bursting bubbles and pandemonium on Wall Street. In an article in this week's issue, he finds a few professors sticking to traditional free-market views of what caused the recession and the great mistakes being committed to repair the damage. More numerous are the academics who are soul-searching and even finger-pointing. The renowned "Chicago School," home of more than a dozen Nobel Prizes, might best be retired as a concept, Mr. Cassidy concludes.

Sewanee: the University of the South announced yesterday that its next president and vice chancellor would be John M. McCardell Jr., president of Middlebury College from 1992 to 2004, who in the last few years has led a campaign to lower the drinking age to 18 based on the premise that the current age -- 21 -- has been a failure and only contributed to binge drinking, Mr. McCardell began the effort in 2007 by founding Choose Responsibility, a nonprofit group that suggested giving "drinking licenses" to 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds who had been educated about the dangers of alcohol. He later helped found the Amethyst Initiative, an effort to lower the drinking age that more than 100 college presidents have endorsed. According to a Sewanee news release, Mr. McCardell, who is also a professor of American history, will step down as president of Choose Responsibility before he takes office next...

Australia refused to grant visas to one-third of the Indian students who applied to its universities from July to October 2009 because they submitted fake documents, The Economic Times reported. The proportion is a substantial increase from the 6.5 percent of such rejections in the corresponding months of 2008, the newpaper said. "A forensic analysis of applications found extremely high rates of fraud within the documentation being provided in support of student-visa applications in India," said a letter to the chief executive officer of Universities Australia by the immigration department. Last year, 95,000 Indians studied in Australia, making up almost 18 percent of its foreign-student population, the second-largest group after China.

Mayors typically worry more about elementary and secondary schools than about higher education, but Philadelphia's first-term mayor, Michael A. Nutter, a Democrat, told The Philadelphia Inquirer that he planned to open an office to help more city residents go to college and graduate. He also said he would push to create more scholarships for Philadelphians at the area's many colleges and universities.

Two dozen top officials at two hospitals affiliated with Harvard Medical School have had sharp restrictions placed on their ability to get lucrative paydays for their service on the boards of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, a move that The New York Times reported today put limits unprecedented in academic medicine on outside pay. The new rules to crack down on conflicts of interest were imposed by Partners Healthcare, the owner of Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's Hospitals, in Boston. The officials must now limit their outside pay to $5,000 a day for actual work connected with board service (some had received more than $200,000 a year), and they may no longer accept corporate stock. The Times quotes a business-ethics professor as saying the policy is a "breath of fresh air" that sets a new standard. But Arnold S. Relman, a former editor of the The New England...

Town-gown relations have taken a hit as the recession has deepened and government budget straits have tightened, and unsuccessful efforts last year in Providence, R.I., and Pittsburgh to tax students were only the most prominent signs of the rocky times. But two colleges and their surrounding municipalities seem to have preserved good relations despite the tough economic times, as evidenced by announcements this past week. On Tuesday, Roger Williams University presented its hometown of Bristol, R.I., with a $1-million water tower, and on Wednesday, Hamilton College said it would contribute $250,000 toward a new fire truck for the town of Hamilton, N.Y. Roger Williams's announcement said the tower was part of a 20-year, $42-million commitment to Bristol that affirmed the university's tax-exempt status.

With the H1N1 flu continuing to pose a particular threat to young people, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is using college-football bowl games to again urge college students and other young people to get vaccinated against the influenza disease, commonly known as swine flu. An advertisement promoting the flu vaccine, which is now said to be in plentiful supply, will air during the Gator Bowl, the GMAC Bowl, the Outback Bowl, and the Valero Alamo Bowl. The campaign reiterates Education Secretary Arne Duncan's urging before the holidays that students get vaccinated.